Would it be cliche to detail my depressed teenage years? The perpetual angst? The constant and oppressive feeling of lonliness and disconnectedness, unyeilding shyness.
How about a recounting of the time I had my mouth wrapped around the business end of a gun?
I was a good student. Straight A's because that was what was expected of me. When my administrator realized I was in too remedial of a math class my freshman year he encouraged me to tutor... which I hated.
My sophomore year I was asked to get a senior classman up to speed. I didn't care for him, and tutoring at his place sucked because it always smelled of smoke and skunk. He was even more annoying in his persistance to get me to talk about anything other than math.
Meanwhile the darkness in my mind grew to consume my waking thoughts. "Would I feel it?" or "how do I keep them from freaking out about my body?".
It was two weeks before summer break and I faked being sick. I wrote a letter and taped it to the door. I got the gun and loaded it. I sat there with my forehead resting against the barrel and calm washed over me. I don't know why but I called him, maybe to say goodbye. He answered "dude im at lunch where are you?" I meant to say something. Anything but: "help me"
"Help you what?" I started to cry.
He ditched class to come to my place. He must have sped judging by how quickly he got there. He pleaded for me to hand over the gun. I told him something asinine and predictable about how he doesn't understand. He wants to he says. He's pretty sure he does he assures me. he takes of his shirt to show me he's covered in scars from cutting. Hundreds, maybr even thousands.
He talks me back from the edge and makes me promise to go on a roadtrip with him to his uncle's in southern California during break.
His uncle is a stereoptypical hippie. His property was on thirty acres and was a meticulously maintained eden. He boasted to me that the only thing he bought from the store over the last decade was table salt and playboys.
My friend leaves me at his uncles on the second weekend while he went out to a party I had no interest in. We got to talking and he told me he had something for me. "Im not into drugs". He counters "but your paxil is ok?"
The day was spent cooking the most unappealing looking filth. We talked deeply and I confessed stuff I hadn't even confessed to myself.
"Why are you afraid to open up to people?"
"Im afraid they'll hate me if they find out I'm gay..."
That evening I started to drink what I thought was the most vile substance I could imagine. A bucket was thrust in my direction just in the nick of time. I apologized. "The spirit has to purge you so you can hear it."
A sliver of the setting sun was shining through a crack in the covered window. It began to dance and pulse as it grew brighter. Particles of dust caught in it path burned brightly like unfortunate planetoids caught in the path of a gamma ray burst.
The rays of light crashed against the wall to my right like raging white water rapids. Brilliantly colored patterns sprang out like mist and saturated the once dark room. I looked at my friends uncle in disbelief and suddenly I felt a presence to my right that had come out of the crashing rays. I recoiled at the abstract vision standing before me.
The last thing I heard from this world was my host saying I was ok. The entity agreed, but how did I know he agreed? Just like how did I know my host had told this entity I'd be coming?
The experience became wild and rolling, this way and that before finally being confronted with a crystaline structure. Me. Or rather my influence. I saw this very experience playing out within the structure, my dog back home laying on my bed. I saw each moment of my life as a pulse spreading out into a larger network.
The movements within this network seemed random. 'There's no sense to it' I thought. The entity wanted me to observe, there was a pattern. A direction. Following this direction I passed by gods, then gods of gods, a pantheon laid out before me. As I progressed further I had this unweilding sensation of time passing by like the countryside slipping away from the view on a train.
Observations became fewer and further between. The beings I passed were incomprehensibly ancient. I was travelling unimaginably fast now, faster than the entity could keep up. *WHAM* a psychic clothesline as I hit the floor at a dead stop.
"Who are you" it wanted to know. It rifled through my mind as if my brain were a rolodex. It chuckled and observved me with curiosity. it grabbed me like a frustrated parent wrangling an impetuous toddler. "How can you possibly feel so alone? Dont you see?" I was flung from that place and descended back into a dizzying array of colors and convoluted visions.
My sleep was intermittent and into the next day. I finally awoke and my friend was kneeling beside me with his hand on my shoulder. I felt different. I FELT. I hugged him and cried. I thanked him a hundred times over for saving my life, my soul.
My mind was ripped from the clutches of the shadows and bathed in light. I couldn't fathom how I could have been so blind as to what was right in front of me. I spent the next couple years processing that experience and turning it into a belief structure for my daily life. No matter how deeply in shadow I found myself I always managed after that to find the light.
So here I am, a longtime lurker stepping out of the shadows once again.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Take the third hit
Then youuu....